1. Technical Field
An aspect of the present invention relates to a printing apparatus, more specifically, a printing apparatus to print images on fabrics.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, a printing apparatus for printing an image on a piece of fabric, having a platen to hold the fabric, a print head to eject inks onto the fabric, a carriage to move the print head, an operation plane, and a set of colored inks, has been known. Such a printing apparatus is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2004-268506. According to the printing apparatus, an image represented by a piece of print data is formed on a piece of fabric as the carriage is moved in a main scanning direction and the platen is moved in an auxiliary direction.
For another example, in United States Patent Application Publication No. US 2005/0179708 A1, a printing apparatus having a plurality of platens to hold a plurality of pieces of fabric aligned on a same horizontal plane is disclosed. According to the latter publication, two images are successively formed on the respective pieces of fabric in inks ejected from a print head so that the images can be formed successively on the plurality of pieces of fabric in shorter lead time.
When the images are formed in the printing apparatus disclosed in the latter publication, an operator can remove a piece of fabric with the image being formed from one of the platens and load a new piece of fabric thereon while an image is formed on another piece of fabric loaded on the other platen so that the images can be formed continuously and thus efficiently.